THIS WEEK’S PASSAGE: MATTHEW 15:21-28
PREPARATION: You’ll need marshmallows, art supplies, flip-chart paper and pens. You will need to print out the questions for the In their
shoes activity.
MOUTH CATCH
5 mins
Get the group into pairs and line them up opposite their partner about a metre apart. Give each young person four marshmallows. One partner must throw the marshmallow and the other must catch it in their mouth. If they manage to catch it, each partner takes a step back. The winners are the pair stood furthest away from each other when they run out of marshmallows. At the end of the game there will probably be a large number of sticky marshmallows on the floor. Ask:
• Who would be willing to eat up those marshmallows? (Don’t actually let them – that’s a health hazard!)
• How desperate would you have to be to eat the marshmallows?
Say: In today’s passage we meet a woman who knows what desperation feels like. She comes to Jesus looking for help, but Jesus’ response might seem a little strange.
A TRICKY LITTLE PASSAGE
5 mins
Read Matthew 15:21-28 together and then ask:
• If you only had this interaction to go on, what would you think about Jesus?
• How do you explain Jesus’ behaviour here?
WHEN JESUS WON’T FIT IN THE BOX
10 mins
Say: On first reading of this passage, Jesus seems to be really mean, unnecessarily making this woman suffer before he heals her daughter, seemingly purely because she’s not Jewish. That seems kind of harsh and maybe a little racist… right? Put three pieces of paper round the room with these headings: ‘The Story is recorded wrongly,’ ‘Jesus isn’t who we thought he was,’ ‘We’re reading the passage wrong.’ Invite the young people to go round the room and pick what they think is the most likely scenario and to write on the paper why they think this is the case.
Say: It is always OK to ask difficult questions of the Bible and God. Spurgeon said that scripture is like a lion, it doesn’t need us to protect it: it’s quite capable of coping with our hardest attack. Often, when we wrestle with scripture long enough and hard enough, while talking to God about it, we will be able to find ourselves satisfied.
KEY POINT
The story crops up in two of the Gospels – a sign it’s likely to be authentic. Throughout scripture Jesus reveals himself to be compassionate and kind, the incarnation of the God who the Bible says is love. Cruelty and the desire to reject and humiliate therefore cannot be in his nature…. So it must be something else…
SOME THINGS TO KNOW
10 mins
Here are some of the things that other Christians have discovered about this passage as they have wrestled with it:
• Jesus is testing the Canaanite woman in order to bestow on her honour and recognition for her faith. The story ends with Jesus celebrating the woman’s ‘great faith’ – one of the highest honours he gives anyone.
• Jesus isn’t just teaching the woman, in fact he’s teaching the disciples about their prejudices. They believed that Jesus should only be serving Jewish people. By playing out their negative prejudices to their fullest extent in front of them here, he forces them to see how awful it would be if they were right.
• After this passage, Jesus drives his point home by healing many gentiles and by performing a miracle for them. While one chapter earlier he miraculously fed 5,000 Jews, he now miraculously feeds 4,000 gentiles. He makes it clear that his mission and grace will include the whole world.
A BIGGER VISION
5 mins
Jesus’ vision for what he was going to do was much bigger than that of his disciples. He knew that people of all races would be included in the kingdom of God. Ask:
• Do you think that there are places where Jesus has a bigger vision than the church does today? What might that look like?
• Do you think there are people that we would hesitate to help or welcome today, who Jesus might treat differently?
IN THEIR SHOES
20 mins
Before the session, gather 14 pairs of shoes. Print out copies of the headings and questions from premieryouthwork.com/links, and place them with some shoes at each station to represent the characters in question. Gather some art resources, and put them either at each station or in the middle of the room. Encourage your group to spend some time creatively responding to the questions. They might like to draw, write or make something, or just sit quietly.
GETTING UNCOMFORTABLE
5 mins
Jesus made a habit of making people uncomfortable to grow their faith. In this instance he challenged the Canaanite woman to reveal the depth of her faith and unmasked the darkness of the disciples prejudices. Ask the group how Jesus has made them uncomfortable recently.
PRAYER
5 mins
Invite the young people to join you in praying this prayer together: God, we thank you that you are bigger and more complex than we give you credit for. Thank you that you see the full extent of our potential and that sometimes you make us uncomfortable to help us grow. This week, please make us uncomfortable in our assumptions and prejudices about people and the Bible, so that we might grow to look more like Jesus. Amen.
